Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure relates generally to data networks, and more particularly to the identification, organization, tracking, and analysis of streaming media in a network.
Description of the Related Art
Streamed media, particularly video, represents an increasingly large percentage of the data delivered over the Internet and other networks. As the popularity of media streaming increases, network providers, content providers, and other service providers increasingly are evaluated by their customers based on their ability to deliver media at a high standard of quality. As such, it is ineffective to simply consider media as another category of traffic on a network, represented merely in standard network metrics, such as in gigabits per second; rather, it behooves service providers to obtain an accurate understanding of the customer's experience. Some efforts to evaluate quality measures for media focus on traditional sampling and coding impairments or on packet loss and associated spatiotemporal artifacts due to unreliable streaming. However, the vast majority of streaming media services are consumed over-the-top (OTT) via reliable streaming, obviating the value of such measures associated with unreliable streaming. Further, many of the existing efforts solely focus on objective measures, failing to take into account subjective data related to the customer's experience.